The joy of being a programmer

I am programming since I am 10 and I am now 38. Today I measure how much good programming bring to my life, directly and indirectly. I’d like to give credit to aspects I love in my job. Hopefully some young people will read this and will consider maybe doing one of the most wonderful job on earth.

Getting in the flow: According to wikipedia, flow is the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. In essence, flow is characterized by complete absorption in what one does. Focus, immersion, being concentrated, involvement … being everyday in the flow by coding hours and hours, contribute a lot to a solid positive state of mind, it is a bit like meditation. These are moments where one can completely forget about minor everyday pesky stuff, but also forget for a while more serious problem in life everyone has to face. Being in the flow is the condition to solve challenging problems and to create beautiful pieces of engineering. Being in the flow can lead to addiction but it is not addiction. This is essential to control when to check-in in the flow and when check-out, making sure to not be disturbed meantime.

Being creative: Being a software engineer is one of the most mainstream way of being paid for being creative. Often, writing software is deemed to be an artistic activity. A programmer has to be humble, because this is a kind of art not understood by the mass. But being humble is a chance to become wiser and increase self-confidence. Also, knowing you are going to be creative for a while, is an excellent motivation to overcome the first step effort to jump in the flow. But the truth is that for every passionate programmer, there is a background thread in the mind in charge of creativity (often running at sleep-time), that makes it so that in the morning the envy to create what you have in mind is too strong.

Becoming an expert: It is common to hear that a programmer must know numerous technologies, that its skill is to learn how to learn new technologies. On this I disagree because what makes me really happy is to master completely a technology and exercise daily my expertise. I used to master all the tricky details of C++ and COM and it was fun. Before that I used to master some assembly level programming and it was fun, I was not even getting paid for that. In 2002/2003 and then 2005 I wrote two editions of a 1.000 pages book on .NET and C# and writing it has been one of the most blessed moment in my career. Since then I capitalize on this knowledge every single hour of coding, letting me focus my thoughts on problems to solve, and not on all the non-trivial things a complex platform like .NET is actually performing under my feet. Of course I am constantly discovering new details about surrounding technologies, like functional programming paradigms through the prism of functional paradigm introduced in .NET languages. But I know what is my core knowledge, both in terms of technologies and in term of program design skills. And as long as I won’t be forced to change my core skills, relying on my expertise to express my creativity and making a living on top of it is a source of personal achievement.

Meet inspiring people sharing the same passion: I imagine meeting peers is a source of happiness for every expert in something. This is also why investing in a solid programming particular set of skills is a positive thing. Not only respect from others programmers arise, but it lets have great exchange with smart people as passionate as you. The importance of flow, underlined above, also comes with the disadvantage of being often alone with your thoughts. Most programmers enjoy working alone anyway, but for those who need a bit of more social activity, having an expertise in something is also a great way to become partly a teacher (in professional or academic spheres), partly an architect and contribute to important decisions, partly a team-leader and be responsible for project progressing, partly a consultant, and be able to share your knowledge in a pleasant social environment. I put the word partly in italic because if your social activity make it so that you are not writing code meant to be run in production anymore, you shouldn’t consider you as a programmer anymore and you’ll loose a great deal of the points I am mentioning here. If you need social interactions all day long, programming is not for you. This is also why (sadly) there are so few women in software, because evolution designed them to be much more social beings than men.

Being involved in something that make sense: Here also my position might be a bit different of what is widely accepted. I agree that for juniors, it is important to multiply the opportunities to work in several different teams and companies, to get an idea of what they like and what they don’t, to be influenced by several inspiring mentors. But once you become seniors, working on the same application in the long term, where you feel well programming in, polishing it days after days, seeing its evolution across years, maintaining it in a clean state by adopting modern paradigms like automatic tests, DbC or relentless refactoring, having your word to say about strategic decisions, personally I found this being a great source of daily happiness and a great motivation to involve myself! In addition, working hard to achieving important milestones regularly, is an excellent way to give a sense to your professional career, which is (much) more the exception than the rule.

Work wherever, whenever you like: A 2KG laptop with the proper tools set installed, a few hours of electricity every 24 hours, this is all what a programmer needs to do his job well. A descent internet connection is often appreciated, and there are today only few points on earth where internet is not available at all somehow. Programming might be probably the less demanding working activity in terms of time and space requirement. Getting in a flow in a 12 hours plane flying across the planet, scheduling half a year to live and work in a paradise tropical island, avoiding traffic jam by staying at home for work (in your pijama), delaying programming in the night or early morning to take care of the kids and their education, all this is not only possible but pretty common actually. Most serious software companies let some of their skilled engineers work wherever they prefer. Did you know that many of the great minds behind Visual Studio didn’t actually moved with their family to Seattle, but still live in their preferred location, sometime far away from the US?

Make a decent living doing something you like: Last but not least, everywhere, skilled programmers get paid above the average salary in their countries, and if we take the example of a developing country like India, good programmers get a much much higher income than the average. On top of that, a skilled programmer have pretty close to zero chances to remain unemployed for a long time. This also means that if you don’t like your current position, it is easy to find another better suited one. This situation is made possible because less than two decades ago, the modern civilization realized that IT is the condition for its development. It is a fact that many of the richest persons in the world were originally programmers and every motivated programmer has the potential to create its own ISV business. A programmer can also decide to make more money by coding for the financial industry, or even bet on a startup and potentially makes millions in a few years.

All the next big things will consume even more IT, this includes human genome analysis for the mass, the entire medicine that will be deeply impacted by that, more prevalent portable devices, more sophisticated entertainments, augmented reality, robots and automated machines to do surgery, to assist the increasing growing number of old people, artificial intelligence in the long term, and certainly everything nobody hasn’t imagined yet. After all 20 years ago, nobody anticipated the impact of Google. 10 years ago nobody anticipated the impact of Facebook and smart phones.

Ok enough getting in the flow of writing my passion for programming, I have some code to write before the weekend

every thing you said is interesting .but there are one negative point in this job.all your creativity and mind power is consumed by this job and after works hours you can not do any serious activity
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Joseph Morgan

I became a programmer by asking myself what I’d do if I didn’t need the money. I love the problem-solving, the reducing of complex processes and decisions to code that can repeat the process. I love the visualization of the flow of data, the inputs and outputs to an object. I think of my objects as if they had concrete existence, and data flows as streams of water through pipes. It lets me exercise both my left brain and my right.

Terry Choo

Thanks for writing this. I think it is important for seniors in this field to share their passion in programming with many of us. Working as one of only two programmers in a small company, sometimes I find myself asking if I’m doing the right thing as I get so little feedback in terms of the actual programming process and passion. Most people in the usual company departments like finance and production are just interested in what you produce but cannot understand the why, which makes it quite frustrating.

Thank you for sharing.

joyce lainer

your blog is very motivating..i’m an incoming 2nd year college of I.T. i’ve learned about JAVA..but i can’t understand most of it though i tried so hard to make it …well anyways,,i’ll be more focus and discipline about programming this time….

http://www.facebook.com/davide.cannone.1 Davide Cannone

I am younger than you (about ten years) and it’s been only a couple of years that I’m in the professional world, but, since I started, I’ve always felt the same sensations that you describe.
Moreover, every time I code something that produces the desired output, I feel proud of my studies’ choices and proud of my skills.